The ads you don’t even know you’re watching

Have you ever seen one of those tweets from Wendy’s? You know the ones, the “savage roasts” and such?

(bored panda.com)

You might also know that there are a lot of fast-food chains and other large companies that are now making tweets in the first person, as if the brand itself is alive and a real person.

One common theory is that these fast-food chains are giving their Twitter accounts to some Gen Z intern to make funny captions for their Twitter accounts. However, there is most likely a team of PR employees working to create these fun tweets. That’s because these Twitter accounts are, at their heart, ads.

This may sound very obvious, but it is easy to forget that you are watching an ad since ads are normally not something people would look forward to. Yet people on Twitter will beg the Wendy’s Twitter account to insult them. These new Twitter ads are interactive and that is what makes them so engaging.

Since a lot of brands are now following this format, they all have begun to respond to one another, creating this chain of corporate brands pretending to be people. But why?

Well, one theory is that by treating a company as a person, people are more likely to relate to the experiences the brand is talking about and then naturally want to go visit those fast food places or buy that brand’s product. Or, when people are trying to think about where they want to go to eat, they think about the funny tweet they saw a corporation make.

But this couldn’t be a bad thing, right? It’s just a clever marketing tool that is fun.